Introduction and description of database

The aim of this report is to analyze how the naturalization in Switzerland evolved in the last years and to understand the profile of the people that seek to obtain the Swiss nationality. Since, there is many attributes that we should take into account, we thoroughly analyze the characteristics of such people, as well as the way they obtained the Swiss nationality.

The following analysis is performed using the data that is provided by the Swiss Federal Statistical Office (FSO later in the report), which is the national competence center for official statistics in Switzerland. The analysis is performed on the data generated between 2011 and 2020.

We are particularly interested in this interval of time because in June 2014, the Swiss Parliament updated the Federal Act on Swiss Citizenship (RS 141.0) and passed a law that restricts heavily the process of naturalization and adds new conditions to it. The law entered in force in January 2018. One of the motivation of this report is to verify and quantify the effect of this law on the number of naturalization.

For this report, we are using 2 complementary dataset: the population of Switzerland by cantons and the geographical characteristics of the cantons. The data is provided by FSO. The main dataset that is used for the report is composed of the following variables:

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The population of Switzerland is now of 8,670 millions in 2020 which was of 7,955 millions in 2011. The number is growing and the number of foreigner citizen is too, from which some of them get the Swiss citizenship. In this document we will explore a database about the acquisition of Swiss nationality.

Investigating the type of acquisition

Looking at this chart, we see that there is two main type of acquisition (ordinary one and simplified one) for a total of 99.38%. As defined in the introduction, there is three type of acquisition that are really special cases (Confirmation of the Swiss nationality, Naturalisation by adoption and Reintegration).

We will focus on these three in the next part and then we won’t consider it anymore in order to focus on the two main types of acquisition.

Basic exploration of three less represented types of acquisiton

Let’s take a look at the following type of acquisition : Confirmation of the Swiss nationality, Naturalization by adoption and Reintegration. Since each type of acquisition are quite different, we will take a look at them one by one.

Confirmation of the Swiss nationality

First, note that there has been only 1452 confirmation between 2011 and 2020 which lead to a mean of 145.2 per year. We first plot the total number of such citizens for the 50 citizenship with the higher values and then look at all by age and gender.

We can see that in the top 10, except for Brazil, there is only European countries, in particular the three first are bordering ones. COMMENT ON THIS

Most of confirmation concerns persons aged less than 20, 90.22% of the total count of confirmed Swiss citizenship. This may be due to the fact that child from Swiss citizens are not immediately declared on their birth day.

Naturalization by adoption

To acquire Swiss citizenship through adoption if the person adopted was under the age of majority (18 years) at the time of adoption.

As before, note that there has been 776 naturalization by adoption between 2011 and 2020 which lead to a mean of 77.6 per year. We first plot the total number of such citizens for the 50 citizenship with the higher values and then look at all by age and gender.

We can see that for previous citizenship with higher numbers are not European, except for Russia and Germany. Ones with higher numbers are countries where poverty is far more present that in Switzerland, especially when we see that Ethiopia is almost 1/5 of the total. COMMENT ON THIS

We see that most of naturalization by adoption are acquired before 20 years, which is relevant with what has been written at the beginning of this section since the concerned person has to be adopted before having attained majority. Note that only 7 persons were 20 and more, so 0.9% of total adopted naturalization concerns.

Reintegration

This type of acquisition is the less represented, there has been only 162 reinstatement of Swiss citizenship in 10 years. This concerns people that have previously held Swiss citizenship but lost it by forfeiting or relieving citizenship, or by marrying a foreign person. There is different criteria for reintegration based on where the concerned person lives. Some criteria are purely subjective ones.

Note that there has been only 162 naturalization by adoption between 2011 and 2020 which lead to a mean of 16.2 per year. We first plot the total number of such citizens and then look at all by age and gender.

We can see that the top 4 is composed only by bordering countries which means that concerned individuals may have gone to these countries after losing their Swiss citizenship. We also see that Stateless appeared on y axis which means that the individual that obtained the Swiss citizenship had only Swiss nationality when he lost it.

The most represented class of age is people aged between 30 and 39 with a count of 55, which represents 33.95% of the total amount of reintegrated people.

Over time

We will now visualize time series of these three type of acquisitions. Beginning with Confirmation of the Swiss nationality, we see that there the number of such acquisition is decreasing since 2012 and has been divided by almost 4 in 9 years. COMMENT ON THIS For Naturalization by adoption, there has been a huge drop between 2013 and 2015. COMMENT ON THIS Finishing with Reintegration, numbers are slowly increasing throughout the years except for a peak in 2019 where the number seems extreme compared to other years. COMMENT ON THIS

NEED TO COMPLETE AND MODIFY FROM HERE

Exploration by ordinary and simplified naturalization categorized

In this section we will explore ordinary and simplified naturalization and compare them since these two type of acquisition are the most common ones. We can also compare these two since the procedure is quite the same.